Platform

Box World Tour Tokyo: Changing the Way Japan Works

Today, we officially launched in Japan and held our first-ever Box World Tour in Tokyo. I was thrilled to be there in person, and it was truly impressive to see our new K.K. Box Japan team welcome nearly 500 attendees -- customers, partners and IT leaders -- for a full day of great presentations and discussion around cloud. There’s a lot of excitement here, and IT leaders in Japan have clearly made cloud a top priority. You could feel that interest from the buzz in the room.

Building on that buzz, the highlight of the day was a traditional sake barrel breaking, complete with Box masu (square wooden sake cups) to celebrate the new office.

The day started fast when Aaron Levie walked onstage to "The Final Countdown," and proceeded to share the Box vision for collaboration, cloud platforms and business transformation. Managing Director Katsunori Furuichi followed him to officially launch Box Japan and introduce our localized product, new customers and the Tokyo team to the audience. He also shared his ambitious personal goals. First, he sees Box Japan driving a wave of tech innovation that will rejuvenate Japanese business productivity. Second, he aims to drive a change cloud perceptions in Japan. Today was a great way to kickstart that goal.

Keeping tradition with our other Box World Tour stops, we invited great guest speakers to the stage. First, Professor Kusunoki, professor of International Business Strategy at Hitotsubashi University shared his thoughts on innovation, strategy and importance of storytelling. Next, we heard from Box customers DeNA and JGC. DeNA explained their use of Box for secure file sharing and mobile collaboration, and the benefits they're getting by integrating apps across their IT environment. JGC showed how more than a thousand project collaborators worldwide share information more effectively and securely, using Box on multiple devices to complete projects more efficiently.

Partners got in on the action, too. After the sessions, 12 companies, including Salesforce.com, Jive, MobileIron, Splunk, Ping Identity, CTC/Itochu, Macnica, and MKI, hosted customers in our partner pavilion. During the event, Konica Minolta, NTT Communications and Cybozu officially launched their platform integrations, which make it easier for Japanese customers to manage documents, improve customer service and embed our rich document preview services into business applications.

We're so excited to work with an amazing group of new Boxers in Tokyo who are fully invested in helping our partners and businesses move to the cloud. I can't wait to see what we can do together in Japan.